The rise of the Other Albany

Our opinion: A big development of affordable housing is planned for the long-neglected Sheridan Hollow neighborhood. It could be the start of the transformation of the city.

What just might be the most exciting development in Albany this summer rises just far enough from the glitter and the money, and the vibrance and the hope, of downtown that you might miss it.

Just below Arbor Hill, and all the visible challenges of urban life, lies the Sheridan Hollow neighborhood — frighteningly empty and seemingly forgotten. Despair isn’t really the issue here. Desolation is more like it.

Revitalization will be a huge order — about as ambitious as Habitat for Humanity’s plans to build 60 houses, 57 rental apartments and the commercial and retail space, some 10,000 square feet of it, that such development will require.

The biggest such project in the organization’s history in Albany just might save a neighborhood that too many city leaders had written off as beyond hope. The magnitude of a project funded almost entirely by private money and what it can mean for a city with too many places like Sheridan Hollow, with block after block of boarded up houses and vacant lots, is summed up by Tina Robinson, who has lived there for 26 years.

“We who live in Sheridan Hollow having been waiting for this for a long time,” she says. “We were waiting for something to happen, but we didn’t expect it to be this big.”

This is a neighborhood with its own geography stacked against it. The perimeter of Sheridan Hollow is a ravine created by what’s known as Fox Creek.

History is an obstacle to overcome, too, in Sheridan Hollow. The teeming poverty and later the abandonment of the neighborhood dates back to its days as a 19th-century slum inhabited by Irish immigrants.

Then, in the late 20th century, Sheridan Hollow was the unfortunate location of a failed waste-to-energy project that was best known for the pollution it created and the health hazards it imposed on the urban poor.

To think, then, that these early days of the 21st century have the neighborhood on the verge of leading the rebirth of what can be fairly if harshly called the Other Albany. With scant population sparsely spread out over a square mile or so, and well removed from the city’s main thoroughfares, a place like Sheridan Hollow can languish almost out of sight.

It takes the piercing, idealistic vision of organizations like Habitat for Humanity and the Touhey Homeownership Foundation to change that. It requires looking just beyond the eastern border of Sheridan Hollow, to the condos for the upper-income crowd popping up along Sheridan Avenue, Orange Street and Chapel Street, to ask why people of much more modest means can’t also enjoy decent housing.

It’s happened before in Albany, under equally daunting circumstances. Sixteen one-family row houses built by Habitat for Humanity now stand on Alexander and Delaware streets in the South End, just six years after the citywide crisis of abandoned buildings hit its nadir.

“We’ve had lots of false starts, lots of ribbon cuttings, lots of things, but I’m here to tell you that we are going to produce this time,” says developer Charles Touhey.

With that in mind, take a slow drive through the neighborhood. Imagine what is about to transform the overgrown lots, the deteriorating houses, the gaping spaces. Suddenly, Sheridan Hollow won’t seem so discouraging, after all.